Education/Meetings

October 28, 2008

Those Who Can, Do — And They’re the Ones I Want to Meet

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Hearkening back to this earlier post, and this comment conversation — and what the hey, probably has something to do with this one as well.

Here’s how we put together the workshop program for our upcoming 2009 conference:

• Developed a list of over 120 potential topics — generated from attendee suggestions last year, committees, a direct request to members, and staff
• Sent them out as a survey asking our contractor members to rate the topics, from “I would definitely go to this” down to “You couldn’t pay me to sit through this” (I’m paraphrasing)
• Broke the responses down across a couple pertinent industry segment categories
• Looked at the topics that were rated 80% or higher positive by the various segments, and …
• Went out and found people who could deliver intelligent presentations on these topics based on their experience.

Was this the easiest way to put a program together? Good God, no … far easier would have been to look at the hundreds of requests and proposals that come across my way each year from people (mostly consultants, vendors, and professional speakers) just dying to speak at our conference.

But last year was the first year we did it this way, and got a very positive response — and the initial program this year has garnered a lot of interest, with registrations outpacing last year’s at this time.

Of the workshops being offered at our conference in 2009, 76% of presenters and panelists will be contractors, and 24% consultants or vendors.

This seems about right to me. Certainly as an attendee of conferences, it’s a ratio I’m more comfortable with.

Not saying this is the way everyone should do it, it’s just an example of how one organization is doing it. But if half or more of your program presenters are primarily in the business of selling things to your members/attendees, you might want to rethink whatever way you’re doing it.

October 20, 2008

So, You’re the One On the Program, But I’m the One Expected to Provide Content?

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David Patt has been on another one of his tears about forced “interactivity” in meetings — in posts like this one, and in comments on other blogs (sometimes these feeds just all run together). I think it started with this Acronym post from an Associations Now cover article.

On this one, I am totally on David’s side.

Let me go on record as saying that I am tired of going to conference workshops where lazy … er, I mean “provocative” … presenters ask the attendees at round tables to “take 10 minutes” and speak with the random people who happened to sit at the same table with them. Maybe the presenter assigned you a “task,” and expects you to “report” after your discussion; or maybe it’s just a brief discussion period to give the presenter an opportunity to wander from table to table trolling for clients.

Whatever the stated reason, it has never been anything but a complete waste of time.

I think some of these attempts are classic examples of “learning the wrong lesson.” The lesson people think they are learning is, “Our attendees always talk about how valuable the ‘hallway track’ is, so that means they really want to just talk to each other.”

The point they are missing is that the “hallway track” is so valuable BECAUSE it happens in-between program events and in the hallway. Those stolen moments of conversation and connection are made more important by the fact that there is a program happening around them. If you just stick all your attendees in a big open hallway and tell them to have at it, then there’s a certain percentage of people who will think that’s fantastic and get a lot out of it. But there are a lot of other people (a majority, David suggests, and I suspect), who will stand around thinking, “Wow, what a waste of my time.”

So the response has been to try to bring the hallway conversations INTO the workshop. Presenters knock a good 20-30 minutes out of their presentation by inviting small group discussion in the midst of their workshop. But this satisfies no one because the people who are REALLY into the hallway track aren’t in the room (they’re in the hallway), and the people in the room are stuck listening to the one guy at their table who thinks he knows more than the presenter anyway (or has something to sell).

Now, I’m not saying that all interactivity is wrong. I’m saying it has to be CLEARLY promoted. For example, if you’re doing a workshop that’s going to be a review of a case study with different groups taking different roles, then that’s how you describe it — and people know what to expect. Or a workshop that’s clearly promoted as a “discussion” on a topic with a “discussion leader.”

But if it’s just a workshop as they are usually promoted, then the presenter should comfort herself knowing that everyone in the room is there because they think SHE is the expert and they want to hear what SHE has to say.

Finally, to those speakers who try to “break the ice” by involving the audience, a cautionary tale: at a meeting we held the week before last in Houston, a speaker tried to make a point about generations by asking a member of the audience how he got along with his parents when he was a teenager. After a long pause, the audience member said, “I don’t like to talk about my childhood.”

Um … AWK-ward.

(Oh, and that meeting the week before last in Houston? Brand-new “little” event for us, for a professional niche in our industry … sold-out crowd of more than 300 people … twice as many vendors as we expected … and other than that one awkward moment, a huge success all around. That’s just a little shout-out to all of the economic doom-criers out there.)

August 27, 2008

The Emotional Connection

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Suffice to say that I am not a Democrat, however, I watched the first part of Hillary Clinton’s speech at the convention last night, including the tribute video that they played as her introduction, narrated by her daughter. I have to say it was a very effective introduction, and I can only imagine that, at the event, on the big screen, it must have made a powerful connection.

It was an excellent example for associations of an effective “opening” — of a conference, of a general session, of a chairman’s term, of a speech — because of the way it combined substance (the video leaves no doubt as to what Hillary believes about several issues) with humor and emotion to make a genuine connection with the audience and put them in the right mood for what’s coming next. Since many of us witnessed a not-so-good example recently, I thought perhaps it would be nice to emphasize a good example.

You don’t have to use video in your conference intros, of course; there are any number of ways to set the stage for a good experience, as long as you remember the point is to excite, to make people laugh, to make that emotional connection. Walking up to the podium and saying, “Good morning,” is definitely not one of those ways.

July 28, 2008

When Did It Become Presenter vs. Attendee?

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Sue Pelletier responds to the Allen Stern post I linked to (referencing social media gone wild in a conference panel) by pointing to someone else’s idea for trying to harness this energy. Jeffrey Veen writes:

“As we were planning Start, he said, ‘We should have someone onstage the whole time to represent the audience. Like an ombudsman does for a newspaper.’ So we decided to put a desk on stage and have our friend George Oates fill that roll. She’ll be on Twitter, IM, and email listening to what people are talking about. (We’ll also have volunteers collecting index cards for those not wanting to be online during the sessions.) And she’ll synthesize questions, interrupt us if we get boring, and call bull[**] if something sounds like it.”

All of these various posts about rambunctious attendees, and phrases like “call bull[**] if something sounds like it”, make me wonder: When did conference educational sessions become us versus them? I mean, it’s one thing to use different tools to collect questions for the presenters, but what’s up with all this backchannel backbiting and complaining I’ve been reading about from various conferences?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but at most conferences (especially association conferences, which typically don’t pay workshop presenters, or at least don’t offer them much) — aren’t people who agree to give presentations or participate in panels doing the organization, the conference, and the attendees a favor?

I’m not saying attendees shouldn’t disagree with panelists, or ask provocative questions at the appropriate place — I think they most definitely should, it makes for a more interesting workshop — but what happened to common courtesy?

I believe part of what may be fueling this is an over-reliance among many organizers on using vendors and consultants at their workshops instead of practitioners from their industry and profession. Sure, it’s a lot easier to use consultants, because they’re easy to work with, they’ve usually got good presentation skills, and they tend to get higher ratings. But that doesn’t necessarily make them more useful to the audience (and the audience will not feel the same empathy toward a vendor/consultant that they will feel toward a fellow practitioner).

For example, I’ve sat through many workshops given by association executives where I may have felt that the presenter didn’t have great presentation skills, or I may have disagreed with some of the conclusions she draws, but I still felt the workshop was a worthwhile use of my time because it was an opportunity to hear actual experiences from a fellow professional. I’m rarely that charitable with vendors, consultants, or professional speakers, and I get annoyed when I have to try and pick through a series of workshops in a schedule that seems overburdened with non-association speakers. (Like I had to do in order to plan my schedule in San Diego next month.)

Ultimately, I believe organizers have a responsibility to attendees and presenters to find topics that attendees actually want to hear about, and then find the right people to talk about them (not vice versa). Presenters have a responsibility to attendees and organizers to prepare sessions with the real audience in mind and be prepared to answer questions. And, attendees have a responsibility, too — to themselves and all the other attendees — to act like professional adults and make smart choices about what sessions to attend. If you already know all about a certain topic, or if you already know that you’re not interested in what a particular person has to say about the topic, then don’t go and then complain about it. Instead, go to a different workshop. (And remember to volunteer to present on the topic you already know so well next year.)

May 4, 2008

Wiki your workshop! (But don’t say wiki)

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A quick and easy way to experiment with “user-generated content” is to use a basic wiki page to solicit ideas from members for a specific conference workshop or other kind of seminar. Last spring, we asked our members to add their best ideas for “customer retention” to a page and we used their submissions to help create a breakout at our annual meeting. Here’s how it worked:

• We created a page at writeboard.com
• We started the page off with some basic instructions on how to add ideas
• We solicited about 8 or 9 “seed” ideas from some of our “go-to” members and added them
• We sent an email out to our members and asked them for their best ideas with the link and password to the page, along with a deadline for submissions
• Before the deadline we sent a couple more reminders out

We wound up getting a pretty good response — about 40 or 50 submitted ideas (some people did choose to email me their ideas rather than post them to the wiki), of which around 30 we thought were really interesting. We added about 20 other ideas from other sources, and got one of our members, who happens to be a fairly dynamic presenter and organizer, to pull everything into a fast-paced 75-minute workshop we called “50 Ways to Leave Your Customers Wanting More.” We promoted the breakout as “the session created by our members!” at our conference earlier this year.

It wound up being one of our highest-attended and highest-rated workshops (though of course, a lot of this depends on picking the right person to organize it and deliver it). We’ll be using the content again, as an audio seminar or series of articles. And we will be using the same model to help develop other content since it worked out so well.

You could just as easily solicit ideas for something like this via email. I feel that the value of using a wiki is that the participants get to see the other ideas that have been submitted in “real time” which allows them to build on them, refrain from submitting something that has already been posted, and maybe get a quick idea they can put to use right away without having to wait for the workshop.

Depending on your audience, you may want to avoid using the word “wiki” when doing this. People know what a webpage is, they know how to login to a site, they know how to type and cut and paste, but they don’t necessarily know what a “wiki” is and using a strange term like that can erect a barrier. Give them the instructions they need in clear language that everyone understands.

And, I strongly recommend that you “seed” the page with content to avoid blank page syndrome.

September 12, 2006

Hello, My Name Is …. Little Miss Sunshine?

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Okay, if you haven’t already seen Little Miss Sunshine, then

1) You need to see it, and

2) There are going to be some spoilers in this post, so consider this a warning that I am going to be talking about the plot.

Okay, so Little Miss Sunshine is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. And I’m bringing it up here because it brought to mind a couple of completely unrelated points about meetings which are not particularly enlightening but which I found amusing. In fact, it may be the first comedy about event planning.

Basically, the movie is about a ridiculously dysfunctional family that heads out in a broken-down VW bus to take their daughter to compete in a beauty pageant called “Little Miss Sunshine.” That’s really it. Most of the major plot points are completely ripped off of National Lampoon’s Vacation, but they’re just done so much better. Now, what struck me while watching:

The father is a wanna-be motivational speaker. Greg Kinnear plays the father who is a wanna-be motivational speaker and has created some really lame program called the “9 Steps” program for success (”Refuse to Lose”). He is, of course, a loser, and the best portrayal of a motivational speaker since Chris Farley lived in a “van down by the river.”  He is always on the verge of a next big deal and in a particularly funny scene chases down his agent, who is attending a conference in Scottsdale, to find out what’s going on with his book deal. Even though I’ve already given the spoiler warning, I don’t want to dwell too much on the details, but suffice to say that what the agent tells him pretty much sums up what those of us who work with a lot of these types of speakers already know about them.

There are bureaucrats working registration! “Five minutes late? Sorry … registration’s closed. If I made an exception for you, that wouldn’t be fair to the people who followed the rules, now would it?” Yeah, it’s an extreme and silly example, but …. aaaargh….what is it about these sorts of things that rules become more important to the worker bees than the reality? Registration at any event is always the most painful part of the event. Why? Because you have to do it, you have to stand in line, you have to get the bag, you have to check your name off, you have to put up with the temps who are following their checklist procedures because that’s what they’ve been told to do.

I’ll give serious kudos to ASAE, who each year seem to make registration more and more painless and more and more efficient. It doesn’t even seem like a chore — this year there were people wandering around with handheld scanners zapping your pre-mailed name badge and bam, that was it. Those first impressions matter, they create the initial impression with which people are going to judge the rest of the organization’s capabilities throughout the rest of the meeting. Yet meetings still large and small that I’ve been to make their poor attendees go through a painful period of dealing with an unsmiling bureaucrat searching for their name on the attendee list. Make registration easy — hell, you don’t have to work much harder than that to make it fun (have music play, give out candy or little gifts, engage the registrants in conversation, arrange for board members to “work the line” in shifts and just introduce themselves to registrants or chat, etc.) — and it will make a big difference in the psychology of your event.

Well, anyway, this whole post was just a thinly veiled reason to talk about a movie I thought was great. So see it, seriously. Steve Carell’s a genius and that little girl, whatshername, is phenomenal (hard to believe she’s the same little kid that annoyed me so much in that awful movie Signs).